Ask HN: What are the expectations of a principal engineer in your company?

This will vary by company and what they value. I've worked at LinkedIn and Amazon. At both, the common thread is generally that PE's have impact across several teams. Coding is often minimal and typically focused on highly complex / mission critical code or prototyping. Majority of time is spent reviewing / developing architecture. The problems and solutions they tackle become more ambiguous. In many cases, PE's are the ones identifying problems proactively. Often at smaller companies, this role may be more code heavy.

I'm co-founder of Levels.fyi - we think of this a lot and have developed a 'Standard' leveling based on what we've observed the roles and responsibilities are across many companies. This is the description we have for Principal Engineer:

Impact spans across organizations within the company. Entrusted with business-critical projects and for setting technical vision for an org or multiple orgs. Responsible for reviewing and providing feedback on technical designs across an org. Little to no day-to-day coding. Role depends highly on organizational / company needs and becomes loosely defined. Expected to operate fully autonomously.

You can see descriptions for other levels at: https://www.levels.fyi/standard/

In my corner of Amazon, PEs are the technical peer to high-level people/program managers. The people/project managers are there to make sure that human work proceeds according to plan and have small understanding or concern for nitty gritty technical architecture. In comparison, the PEs have small understanding of the nitty gritty of the human labor management and are there to drive design reviews and act as kind of a veto board for architectural decisions.

PEs rarely provide new ideas in design reviews (our product teams don't need help with that) but often will strike things down or modify existing ideas to fit in with other products, for business reasons, or perhaps because their human management counterpart doesn't like the idea.

Alongside, they usually have some variety of R&D style side projects that they pursue according to their interests/specialties.

Here (noris.de), a principal engineer is expected to:

* do some publications and/or publications in their field of expertise

* provide technical leadership (input on technology decisions, some architecture support, help write guidelines etc.)

* be part of the escalation path if problems cannot be solved otherwise

* help others in the company level up with their skills (at least as far as they are interested)

Here, principals are actively discouraged from becoming team leads (tech and people leadership are separate paths, which suits me quite well).

At the large companies I've worked for, Principal Engineers were more or less strong engineers with the management skills of a Director or VP. That is: strong people skills, project management, program management, leading teams, high business knowledge, strategy, etc. If necessary, they could easily go in and lead an organization of 30-200 people. But they choose to focus on a little bit more engineering/architecture instead of people.

As such there were only about 1 per 2000 employees, and they were always people who are actually Senior, like 20+ years work experience.

You can be more specific using the role guidelines.

Principal Engineers work on projects that span the entire organisation, usually addressing cross cutting concerns of several teams. They advice Directors and VPs on strategical, mid/long term technical decisions. They set the standards of quality for the org and engage with the community at large. They work on extremely complex and highly ambiguous problems.

In a chat with a PE he told me that this is the first role where he wasn't told what to do. In that sense, PEs often proactively look for problems to solve or new initiatives that will have a large positive impact in the company, rather than work in items assigned by others.

Lastly PEs are expected to have strong communication and interpersonal skills. They should be a force multiplier, align teams and handle scalations.